Kitty Genovese

The New York Times headline read "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call Police" and the story described how they "watched a killer stalk and stab a woman" for over a half hour. Kitty Genovese died in the 1964 attack, and the unconscionable apathy of the community passed into folk history.

Except it's not exactly "history." The murder happened at 3:30AM on one of the coldest nights of the year when windows were closed and people were asleep. Those who were awakened and spotted Kitty on the ill-lit sidewalk outside a bar likely saw her get up staggering after the stabbing and assumed she was drunk. Most witnesses only observed the incident for a few seconds. As Paul Hollander and Stanley Milgram of Harvard University noted, the neighbors saw "fragments of an ambiguous, confusing" situation.

The prosecution only found six eye witnesses, two of whom actually knew what happened. Neither Joseph Fink nor Karl Ross called for help, and they were shamed for their inaction. But it was unfair to paint a picture of the other neighbors hanging out their windows apathetically watching Kitty Genovese die.

The killer was apprehended five days later when he was spotted leaving a house with a TV set by a neighbor. The Assistant DA who prosecuted the case, Charles Skoller, explains,
"The neighbor walked over to him and said, "What are you doing?"
He said, "I'm helping the people move."
The neighbor didn't believe him, went next door to another neighbor and said "Are the Bannisters moving?"
He says, "No, absolutely not"..."I'll call the police, you disconnect the distributor cap in his car."
The citizens of NYC came through.

The Kitty Genovese case gave New York City a black eye that still lingers. Most people saw it as a big city phenomenon but now, forty years later, apathy and self-centeredness have no bounds.

Durham (pop. 9,115) is a quaint town in the New Hampshire countryside that's home to the University of New Hampshire. The university's architecture is brick colonial, its wooded campus is welcoming, and it has a reputation for academic excellence.

Nobody would expect to be kicked, punched and badly beaten here. But it happened to a 21 year-old student who was assaulted by up to five attackers last Halloween night. No one helped, but multiple passers-by stopped to watch. They were useless witnesses since no one offered descriptions, except to note that one assailant was dressed as a hot dog or a banana.

This wasn't a dark New York City street. And the witnesses weren't behind closed windows at 3:30AM. No, they were kids who attend a college that ironically has a program called "Bringing in the Bystander" that supposedly teaches students how to react in these situations.

According to Holly Ramer of the Associated Press, the "marketing campaign involves plastering the campus with 1,100 posters depicting students intervening to prevent violence or supporting victims afterward. The images also appear on campus computers, dining hall tables, campus buses and water bottles given to every freshman."

It's an obviously ineffective attempt to compensate for a morally relativistic society that enables bystanders to keep clear consciences as they cold-bloodedly refuse to help a person in trouble.

As our morally stunted culture continues to erode Christian principles, the sense of responsibility to each other will deteriorate even more. It's already gotten bad when observers to an incident like this could have dialed 911 on a cell phone without even breaking stride.

But no one did, and apparently no one even has a sense of shame about it. As society shrugs its shoulders with subdued dispproval and asks, "What else is new?"


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